Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Im the happiest man on earth today!!! reason .. I got my DEGREE CERTIFICATE!!!!!I dont have the words to describe it!! ..Actually, it doesnt matter that much .. but subconsiously ive been waiting for this for almost 2 years now ...so thats the reason behind the reason ;)

thanks for all who made this possible .. especially Rakesh for submitting the form, Ashok for inquiring, Nihas, Kesu, Soorji for support

Monday, February 14, 2005

I studied my LKG to 4th standard in an school called St Peters School (formerly Fathima School). It was a nice school, and i liked many of the teachers there. I vaguely remember headmistress Sister Rose, who was there when i was joining the school. When i left, headmistress was Sister Christine. She was from Rome i guess, and didnt know Malayalam.My brother also studied in the same school. I remember the day i joined school. I was okay until my uncle left. Then i started crying. They took me to the printing press (there was a printing press attached to the school). A lady called Reena (she was always there till my 4th), gave me candy and left at the press. I saw another boy also there, he was also crying. When i saw the press working, i stopped crying as it was somehow interesting, the green, red lights, how paper went inside, the person painting the die etc...I was not like other kids at that time. During intervals i never went outside. Teachers always asked me why i was sitting alone in the class. But a kid found me somehow interesting, and he took me outside. He was my best friend till 4th, after that we parted.

I still remember my first exam result. Me and my brother got the result cards on the same day. After reaching home evening, i remember my brother being scolded(?) by my mom and uncle. After this they reached my result card. Unfortunately i didnt know how to interpret the result card, so was afraid of whats going to happen to me. But it seems i got good marks, and they were praising me .. lucky. I remember another incident (dont know whether it occurred on the same day or not) that the teachers demanded to bring parents for something. Again, i didnt know what parents meant, and i heard it as “parrots”. I was worried about where to get parrots, and how to bring it to school. When i reached home, i was relieved to find out that they meant to bring my mom or dad.

There are tons of memories related to that school, and a majority of my way of thinking was formed there.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Ive had a lot of coincident events in my life, and guess everyone has. When I was young (maybe in 3rd standard), I used to think of this somehow related to god. Gradually I lost all these beliefs and became aware that these are just high probable events that we notice (or if one time, it just randomly occurred). Say for eg, most of the day I find a particular person coming to office at the same time I arrive. Now if there were a five second delay, I would not have seen this person. But again I don’t find this something unnatural and think of it as a high probability event.

Monday, February 07, 2005

I like the freedom which we are given in our project. There was a time the things were hell. It was during the *rule* of our ex pl. Nowadays when i feel freedom has got over my head, i just look at all the mails sent by her. Today i was going through it and found that every friday she would send a mail saying there is something going on in production at onsite and "plan your
work accordingly" .. now many times there would be no work for you and even then she would send this .. i remember once i had a conversation with her something like this

me: i dont have anything to do with the delivery tommorrow, can i take *leave*
she: if you think so, okay
me: thanks
she: what for
me: the leave
she: then what about us

This hurt me very much. It meant that since they were suffering, i should also suffer .... it hurt because i also worked hard
many times, like there was a day when i came to office 9am, left 7:30 in the morning because of work. also i used to come on
saturdays because i liked work .. so when she said this, i was thinking .. what about me during those times ..

so i understand the value of my current pl

in another interesting turn of events, i got an appreciation for being "technical backbone" in our project . lol!

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

In my project, we use lots of configuration files. These may be ordinary property files or xml's (note project is done in java). Initially many of the configuration files seemed useful as when you want to change something, you just have to change the config file and dont have to rebuild the whole project (useful in production). We've had many phases in the project. Most of the design decisions need to be extended for the newer phase as it contains more requirements on existing things. This meant discarding some of the configuration settings and writing something new again. These configurations become some new "mini language" in our project. Whereever we find something hard coded is "externalized". Nowadays it looks like everywhere we are trying to "externalize" things. Some of the things cannot be generalized enough, so we might need to tweak somewhere here and there (note the project is a business solution, so lots of special cases etc so cannot be generalized much). Now our coordinator somehow likes databases. He wants anything and everything to be put in database. So lately we've seen most of config files moving into tables.. with fuctional depedencies between them. His argument is that we should be able to change something in production without even having to redeploy. I think the whole scenario is ugly. If there are logic which need to be externalized, what will we do. Interestingly we use JRules (a rule engine) for our project. I dont have much exposure to it, but we can embed logic in it. The problem.. not everyone is good at it, and its slow (more need to be investigated).So again we dont use it for configurations. I thought of moving somethings to Jython (if its possible), but worry finally that project will become a sphagetti of Jython + Java + again simple files. And all these things maybe worthless because in next phase some new case will come which will break these things. Strangely everybody here likes reflection a lot (especially our coordinator) .. you will find what class, what method(!) to invoke etc in database tables . These can be easily done using Interfaces in java (not required in python because of ducktyping), but they dont care.

All these things taught me that dont externalize something unless its absolutely necessary.